1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for reducing current draw of a plurality of solid state drives at computer startup.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
One area of computer technology that has experienced advancements is disk drive technology. Disk drive technology is moving away from hard disk drives with spinning platters and other moving parts, to solid state drives containing no moving parts. Such solid state drives typically include some form of non-volatile memory such as Flash memory. Some solid state drives also include a portion of volatile memory such as DRAM that is used to increase performance of access to data in the solid state drives. The volatile memory, however, without a consistent charge will lose the data stored in the memory. To safeguard data stored in the volatile memory at the occurrence of a sudden loss of power to the solid state drive, a capacitor is included in the solid state drive. The capacitor provides a temporary charge to the volatile memory even after withdrawal of operational power for the solid state drive. The capacitor draws a relatively large amount of power when initially charged, however, typically upon startup of the computer. Such current draw has largely been ignored to date, because solid state drives are typically implemented in small numbers in computer systems. As technology advances, however, arrays of a large number of solid state drives are being implemented in a single computer or server enclosure where all the solid state drives of the array share the same power supply. The cumulative current draw of the capacitors of such an array of a solid state drive is inefficient and may cause power supply failure as the number of solid state drives increases.